The coarse wheat bran scraped his dry throat, as though he had swallowed a handful of sand.
Bruce swallowed the last mouthful of dark bread. His stomach cramped in protest at food it had gone without for so long, but he did not stop chewing.
He sat on the creaking single bed, watching Jack carefully cut the small, hardened piece of cheese into thin slices, lay them on the cut surfaces of the potatoes, and hand them to the pregnant Janet.
The dim incandescent bulb swayed overhead. In this drafty, cramped rented room, where gangsters might kick down the door at any moment, Bruce saw something he had never seen in the past twenty-five years.
A bottom line.
Yang Ming had won. The Asian doctor who always wore a white coat and spoke with knife-sharp venom had forced Gotham's underlying logic into his head in the cruelest, most truthful way possible.
Falcone was a tumor, but until that tumor was removed, he was the only immune system keeping people at the bottom like Jack alive. If Bruce had shattered that system as Batman last night, Janet would not even have been able to collect these two potatoes from the relief station this morning.
"Thanks for the bread, Jack." Bruce threw back the tattered blanket and set his bare feet on the cold wooden floor.
"You're leaving?" Jack froze, still holding the blunt knife he had used to cut the cheese. "It's still raining outside. Your injuries..."
"I need to figure out how this city can actually be treated." Bruce picked up the worn plaid shirt and pulled it over his body, wrapped in coarse bandages. He did not look back, only pausing when he reached the door.
"If you ever find you can't hold on anymore, go to Wayne Enterprises